Local politics and Wikipedia

WikiProject Oregon just hit an exciting milestone: with Esprqii’s recent addition of a brief biography of Senator Laurie Monnes Anderson, Wikipedia now has an article on every current member of the Oregon State Senate. Some have just the basics (we call them “stubs”), but others offer a pretty good introduction to the senator’s personal background and career, carefully sourced to the legislature’s web site and newspaper coverage.

Longtime project leader Aboutmovies has been running the Collaboration of the Week program for well over a year now, giving us a great excuse to focus our energies and build content together.

The federal Works Progress Administration built this stone structure near Balch Creek in the 1930s. The city maintained it as a public restroom until 1962.

The unassuming Finetooth has been quietly churning out Feature-quality articles on Portland area streams and watersheds, setting a high bar for the entire Wikipedia community on this type of article. See the articles on Johnson Creek and Balch Creek for some of his better work; some day soon, hopefully, we’ll add the Columbia River article (which is visited over 25,000 times in a month) to that list.

New contributors keep joining our ranks, too. Tedder has done excellent work on the Gerding Theater article, and Tesscass is always quick to get the ball rolling on our collaboration projects.

There’s so much good work going on these days, that it’s impossible to extend enough recognition here. Katr67, EncMstr, Steven Walling, Cirt, Zaui, and many others continue to chip away at our project of expanding Wikipedia’s coverage of Oregon-related topics…and the results are really starting to shine. Want a good overview of what we have to offer? Be sure to check out the Oregon portal!